The first step to achieve free traffic is to start running your ads on a wide variety of websites using Google Adwords (text and display). The type of ads you need to run cannot only be branding, they need to be a direct response style. For example, giving away something for free like a 'glute guide e-book'. The content that you're publishing inside those banner ads must drive traffic. Be sure to set aside enough spend to get your ads out across a range of websites so that you get enough traffic to your own site resulting in lead conversion. Start to measure which websites are converting traffic into leads and then into customers. Google Analytics needs to be set up so that when you run ads on a website, you're measuring the conversions accurately. Now that we have analysed which websites are actually driving converting traffic, reach out directly to them. For this exercise, try not to run ads across websites like Wikipedia or The New York Times where you're never going to be able to talk with them directly. Focus on the smaller blogs. They will be more approachable. When you run ads, you pay Google and Google pays the website as a publisher to run your ad. The website gets paid 68% of whatever you pay Google so therefore Google will take the remaining 32%. When reaching out to the owner of the website, mention that you are running ads on their website via Google AdWords. You can tell them that the traffic is great and you would love to run some more ads directly. Make them an offer using the method of payment that you're currently paying Google e.g cost per click but at 80% of what you were paying. This way you are paying less than what you were before and the website is earning more. It’s a win-win! From there, analyse if it's good traffic and get to know the people behind the website personally. You can then leverage this relationship to do other things within the site that will drive even more traffic than you otherwise would get from a banner ad. Then after a few months you can start to see which areas of the individual site generate traffic for your business. You can also see who else advertises on that blog, and again get to know them personally. Once you understand their business and how much money they make from the site, you can get a better idea of the lifetime value from all the traffic on that site. This is when you can enter a negotiation where you could potentially buy that website from them. This opportunity does not mean you have to spend any cash, they may be willing to offer venture financing. A good person to watch for content around vendor financing is Roland Fraser from Scalable. Ultimately you do not know what position the site is in, you might be their only advertiser or they may be tired of running the site and open to selling. Obviously you want to make sure the decision to purchase makes sense to you. If it does, once you have paid it off you end up with completely free traffic. Once you're in a position where you're getting free traffic from those paid sources, you can use that free margin to outspend your competition on other highly competitive traffic sources. Make sure you run the numbers to confirm that this is a worthwhile investment for your business.

As our trainers begin to earn $10,000-$50,000 in revenue per month, a question we commonly get asked is "when is the appropriate time to start building a team and hiring people?" These trainers are starting to make real money and are looking to outsource their remaining admin tasks in order to grow faster. MacroActive trainers share the following in common: they spend as much time working on their business as possible instead of working in it. Instead of telling you what we think is best, we have interviewed one of our most successful trainers to get his take on how he did it. Josef Rakich has helped an overwhelming number of people and he would not have been able to do this without 1. A premium software platform to support tens of thousands of clients at once and 2. A team of people working behind the scenes. Josef’s first employee was an admin/customer service role. This was a jack-of-all-trades type role that could be on the front line dealing with clients but also behind the scenes helping to create content if necessary. When it came to customer service, this person needed to be across both the physical training questions as well as the nutritional questions. So ideally they needed to have that prior knowledge and passion themselves. This person would respond as themselves and didn’t act as “Josef Rakich” although some trainers have chosen to do this as well. This meant that when someone emailed ‘Josef Rakich Fitness' they would be replied to by a member of the “team”. MacroActive has created an entire division in the company to facilitate this first hire on your behalf. We have a call centre of personal trainers working for us to answer inbound questions on fitness, nutrition and mindset. We handle all the interviewing, hiring, firing, payroll, holiday pay, sick days etc on your behalf. In exchange for this service, you pay an additional 5% revenue share. This essentially works out at breakeven. In the last year MacroActive has made exactly the same amount from that 5% as it has cost us to deliver that service on your behalf. We see the time and energy to manage this division as an investment in you, our trainers. The numbers are really clear on this; the trainers who leverage this service earn more, impact more lives, avoid burnout and are ultimately able to focus more on high value tasks to grow their business. The next person Josef hired was his manager, so a leadership role came next as opposed to another admin/customer service role. He felt that this really transformed Josef Rakich Fitness from a personal brand to a business. A leader/manager would be someone who can add value to the development of your business, help you organise your accounting and give you direction. Josef also believes that having a manager helped him make that mental shift from running a side hustle to growing his business. The necessity of this leader/manager role boils down to how hands on you are as a manager. If you enjoy people reporting to you and are skilled at managing time then I might skip a manager until after your next 2 hires. From here it will become a lot clearer who those next hires should be to build a strong team that is aligned with the company goals. Once Josef had customer support and management under control he hired a video editor who could also create content and run social media advertising. So more specialised than what the admin person could help with but still very flexible in what they could do. If you are a hands on manager, this video editor/social media advertising person will be your first hire after outsourcing your customer support *essentially at cost to MacroActive*. When you bring on more people, you will notice the business growing. At this point, Josef needed to hire another customer support person to help the original employee with the volume of queries coming through (this is something you don't have to worry about if you outsource at scale with MacroActive). Josef now had the time to answer DM’s and interact with his clients to build trust and emotional connection. Those tasks still take a lot of time but often it will translate to longer customer lifetime value. Your clients will value your business so much more when the face of the brand actually takes the time to interact with their audience. We have found that replying to customers DM's with voice/video replies are an exceptional way to deepen the relationship and trust with your audience. This can only happen when the other more tedious and manual processes are removed from your priorities like replying to customer support emails or editing content. This will help your clients to stick to the meal plan and training programme meaning it is more likely they will see results. Who you hire must also be relevant to the stage of business you are in. For example, if you are gaining heaps of organic reach and can’t keep up with demand it probably wouldn’t make sense to hire a social media and marketing person to increase sales. You would want to get someone who can assist with all of the customer queries you are receiving. Again, this is something MacroActive does on your behalf if we manage this for you. Then once you are managing demand on this end, look to hire someone who can help grow your business. An easy way to work this out would be to write down your three most time intensive tasks that you do regularly. From this list, which ones could another person be taught to do? What tasks do you want to remove from your daily routine and how will this have a positive impact on your business? What did Josef do with the extra time he gained from passing on those tedious jobs? He was able to create a lot more content. Ironically, the quality of content was a bi-product of more volume of content. Obviously not all of the content landed perfectly but through producing a lot more, he began to discover hidden gems within the volume that we otherwise wouldn't have found if we were too focused on making everything perfect. For a long time Josef was also doing customer support and so once he could fully pass on this job to his employee, he could actually focus on the customer experience - the content and growing himself as a personal brand. Working ON his business as opposed to IN it allowed him to level up and change so many more lives around the world. So, who are you going to hire next?

If you have heard “email is dead” - you are WRONG! Having an engaged mailing list is not only an effective technique to increase sales and grow your audience but it can also help you to build a trusting and loyal fanbase meaning they are more likely to remain consistent in buying from you. But before getting too excited about having a massive mailing list, you must also be aware of how to maintain this audience and ensure that they are actually clicking into the emails. In a MacroActive Radio podcast episode , we brought on Michael Trillsteen who is “the guy behind the guy” meaning he is the guy behind influencers successful email marketing. Within the episode we discussed various techniques a person can use to improve their click-through rate which is the amount of people engaging with each email. You want your emails to have authentic purpose and value at the core of them. The best way to achieve this is to write authentically. Don’t try to make it too “fancy” - it will actually make the process more difficult for you. Grammar can be dealt with later, the main thing is that you are sending out content that sounds as if it is coming directly from you. Try to address them directly e.g “you are going to achieve your goals” “Join my exclusive facebook group for more information”. This is a conversation between you and them individually. Sales emails can leave consumers with a bad impression if not used effectively. For example no one likes heaps of spam emails that only ever ask the recipient for a sale and never provide any value. This value can be anything from workout inspiration to educating the recipient on mindset. When your click-through rate increases it improves your chances of appearing in the main inbox more often instead of being pushed to promotions or spam. Another tip here is to avoid using certain words like free/sale/offer/last chance as google will recognise this as spam/junk. Here are a few ideas you can implement to give your emails the click factor and remove the icky feeling that comes from spam. Could you add a relevant headline? What’s happening in the news right now and how can this relate to the content you are sending out? These headlines in emails will be attention grabbing as it is directly relevant to the recipient at that time, increasing the likelihood that they will open the email. Is there an opportunity to create clickbait here - clickbait being a dramatised title to pull people in but that has little relevance to the actual purpose of the email. How can you create clickbait with relevant titles? Is the value you are providing creative? Don’t be afraid to be a little bit “out there” to grab attention. A blog, poem, video or something a bit out of the ordinary might help! Every creator and influencer will have a different type of content they prefer to share. Find your niche; is it humour, education, inspiration or something else? Find creativity within what you enjoy! The potential customer wants to see the most authentic you. Make sure you have enough variety in your content as well, don’t make it predictable! You want your audience to look forward to receiving these and recognise that they are about to get something from it. Keen to learn more about email marketing? Check out the podcast episode here .

Imagine years of building up a global fitness brand, restless nights, hard work and a lot of time spent with clients for it all to be ruined in a couple sentences. This is the power of a bad google review. Some of our trainers have been here before and it can cause a lot of stress! So in today’s blog, let’s have a chat about why it is so important to monitor your google reviews and then how we do it. It is easy to forget about google reviews as often the majority of sales come through our social media feeds and what we call “social proof” is pushing them. An example of social proof is a comment where someone has explained how much progress they have seen from your plan. A negative google review is also a form of social proof and therefore a representation of the customer experience. Having negative google reviews as a result of not monitoring them can decrease your rating and give potential clients a bad impression before even entering your site. You should also be genuinely interested in feedback regardless so that you can improve a customer’s experience with the product and avoid having a negative representation of it online. In contrast to the above, having NO google reviews can do just as much damage. This is because when you receive reviews it can increase your search engine optimisation and visibility. Google will track the activity of your ratings and reviews and then boost the businesses with high engagement. Visibility is really important because it means if someone is to search general terms like “fitness trainer UK” or “female body transformations au” - if that is something you focus on or promote then you are more likely to appear in search results. When you are receiving a higher number of reviews and then replying/engaging with these reviews, it shows potential customers that you are “showing up”. If you are showing up it means you care about your customers both past and present as well as demonstrating a keen interest in the development of your business whether good or bad. This will provide a positive impression to both existing and potential customers. Overall, 70% of online searches go through google! Woah! So the chances of someone stumbling on your google reviews is high! You don’t want one negative review to drown out the hundreds of happy clients who are silent on google. First step is to google yourself! Check in on your reviews, what is the current state of them and do you need to do some improving? Even if all you see are positive reviews, make sure you are replying and engaging with them to demonstrate that you are “showing up” as discussed earlier. Now that you are fully aware of why we need google reviews, let’s understand the how. Here are 10 examples of how we can increase our google reviews: Do a round of emails to trusted clients. Do a swipe-up link to your google review page (find this link by googling “your business - reviews” then select “write a review” copy that link and put it in your swipe-up. Include the link to your google reviews on your website. Send out a bulk email to your mailing list. Use an online tool - for example; “sweepwidget” is a tool where you can run giveaways by providing entrants with an easy CTA like following an instagram page or leaving a google review. This increases the likelihood of more people entering as they can do it all from one page. Running your own independent giveaway. Run a promotion in exchange for a google review (e.g 20% off). Testimonials in exchange for product (free access to online app for 3 months). Promote it across all social media platforms. Create a Linktree for your bio and include the google review link as one of them (this is a software where you can have multiple link portals inside one link so your customers can access many different parts of your offering e.g your website and google review page). Now that we understand why we need google reviews and how to increase the amount of them - our businesses can be at its best! As a last resort to get you even more interested in the importance of a google review, here are a few stats. According to a blog written by www.oberlo.com - 56% of consumers read at least 4 reviews before buying a product and product pages with reviews experience 3.5 times more conversions than those without! It’s the small changes that will have the biggest impact. Find more awesome education in our other blogs or check out our podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

WHAT WE USE FoodWorks is a trusted nutrition analysis which is comprised of the most up to date, accurate and latest food data. FoodWorks includes regularly updated quality-controlled food data. It comprises of both official and specialized data. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Accuracy. The nutritional data used for the production of your meal plans, is accurate, brand specific, up to date, specialized and professionally checked. SO... WHY IS IT DIFFERENT FROM THESE OTHER POPULAR APPS? It's professionally checked. Common applications do not rely on nutrition professionals to input data.Instead, they allow anyone to enter data, even you! This is not professionally checked and therefore is much less accurate than FoodWorks. It is important to also note, that nutritional data may differ significantly between brands, countries even for the same product. Common applications will not take this into account, while FoodWorks will. TAKEAWAY MESSAGE Our In-House Dietitian uses a software called FoodWorks to ensure the most up to date and accurate nutritional information is used. Common applications may not be as accurate and therefore there may be discrepancies between information. Rest assured the nutritional information in your meal plan, is accurate.

Ken Brickley and John Fernandes (MacroActive's CFO) go through the process of setting up a US bank account remotely. The payment gateway Stripe is not available in all countries. If you live in a country where Stripe does not operate yet, this is how to setup a business and a bank account in the US so that you can process credit cards using Stripe.